And, oh. The silhouette that is used for those of us who don't submit a mug shot is male. Does that tell us something about preferences around here?

Posted at February 5, 2008 10:32 AM in response to Reader Posts and Killing Bugs

Hm. I got an error message and then was asked to sign in when I tried to send a comment that I don't see on the thread.

Good luck, guys!

Posted at February 5, 2008 10:31 AM in response to Reader Posts and Killing Bugs

Fourth, the nuclear weapons in other countries are just as alarming if not more so.

"Other countries" includes the United States. The Democrats need to seize the plan by Schultz, Nunn, Kissinger and Perry and run with it.

Posted at November 5, 2007 6:46 AM in response to What to say about Iran

Thought experiment for those who think the double standard is dead: Hillary Clinton, married to her third husband after some very public infidelity and now taking phone calls from him during her speeches.

Posted at October 2, 2007 9:52 AM in response to Practically perfect in every way

I saw it on ABC.

Posted at September 15, 2007 12:39 PM in response to Is it true?

Well, Argentina and Brazil looked like they were heading toward nuclear weapons programs directed at each other for a very long time. But negotiations placed inspectors from each country in the other, eventually brought the IAEA in, and finally led to both countries joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the 1990s.

I'm not saying that the Iranian program isn't directed at weapons, just that the question as posed (false dilemma) puts us into the Cheneyite mindset of having to bomb everything in sight, because it might be a bad guy. Just as the Washington Post today makes it sound like Iran's tunneling at Natanz is for nefarious purposes. If another country was threatening to bomb any and all of your nuclear facilities, what would you do?

Negotiations, for which we have time from all indications of Iran's technical progress, make sense. The Argentina-Brazil example is a good one in this sense.

Posted at July 9, 2007 7:19 AM in response to Which is Worse?

Excuse me, but this formulation, whether an attack on Iran or Iran's going nuclear, is the usual nonsense that the Bush administration and far too much of the MSM keeps presenting to us. It contains far too many assumptions, like that attacking Iran is the only way to keep it from building nuclear weapons.

There are two different time scales: the possibility of an attack on Iran has already been floated a year or so ago. So we may assume that we are looking at something like right away.

IF (please note: IF. This means conditional, a possibility. Iran has stated its peaceful intentions for its nuclear program. We don't have to believe them, and there is evidence that they may well be considering the possibility of something like a nuclear weapons program. But nonetheless, we don't even know yet that this is the purpose of their program.) Repeating, IF Iran is working toward a nuclear weapon, it is unlikely to achieve that goal before three years, very likely later. So this is significantly in the future, leaving time for negotiations and other actions short of an attack.

So it's a dumb question.

Posted at July 8, 2007 4:55 PM in response to Which is Worse?

What you do, to go back to the original question, is to use the kinds of thing Greenwald talks about to negotiate with and pressure Iran so that it gives up the idea of nuclear weapons (if indeed that is really the case) before it gets them.

I know that many would rather scare themselves with fantasies and wring their hands about what a terrible world it could be, but it's going to be a long time before Iran has a nuclear weapon, and we need some good thinking and negotiating NOW!

Posted at July 4, 2007 5:33 AM in response to A Rising Threat

Excuse me, but it wasn't the case that "U.S. intelligence reported, with varying degrees of confidence, that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Africa and had purchased aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors as well as other industrial equipment, such as high-strength magnets, to process that uranium."

Both DOE and State said that the aluminum tubes were unlikely to be useful for centrifuges. We don't know what happened in the interagency process, but those voices were ignored or drowned out in what was initially leaked to the media, in particular Judith Miller.

Politicals will politicize intelligence, but that does not necessarily mean that the intelligence itself was bad.

During the runup to the war, I was looking for some reliable reporting on the intelligence about the aluminum tubes. Miller's reports looked to be coming from the highest sources, but I kept wondering why we didn't hear from DOE intelligence. They're the guys who actually know how to build centrifuges.

I'm sorry, guys, it's not just enough to cast a "political" rap on intelligence. What you say about the IAEA is reasonable, but there were people and agencies within the US government who had the intelligence right and were reporting it that way.

Too bad the MSM reporters, like yourselves, didn't dig far enough to find that.

Posted at June 15, 2007 7:09 AM in response to Intelligence and Pressure Politics

The comments here are pretty much on one theme: the United States has lost its credibility in this (and other) areas. I've said more about that here.

Posted at December 7, 2006 8:13 AM in response to If Britain, Why Not the U.S.?